During the week I wrote some documentation to help people write XSLTs that work really well with EditLive! for XML. Generally any given XSLT will work but there are some techniques you can use to make them work better with the augmentation process we use to add editable fields into your XSLT’s output. Our official document writing took exception to one sentence about where the best place to put “action buttons” is in an XSLT.

Justen Erenkrantz comments on his day at the ball game and it reminded me of just how arrest happy the US police are. Police seem to be managed on a local level in the US so my experience with the San Francisco area police may not apply US wide. I’ve never seen so many people getting arrested in such a short time. For that matter I don’t think I’ve ever seen someone get arrested in real life before my trip to the US.

Well after a being so excited about getting my ADSL connection, my ADSL modem decided to crap out. Every so often it would just lock up hard – all the lights off except the power light – and stay like that even when power cycled. So yesterday I ordered a Billion 7100S which arrived today. It seems to be working after a slight bit of worry that it wasn’t getting an IP (turned out I’d turned the DHCP client off instead of the DHCP server).

Wireless Driver will definitely work on OS X 10.3 (Panther) and also claims to work for 10.2 (Jaguar) and 10.1 so it should cover all your needs. Simply run the installer then either kextload the extension or just reboot and specify the network to connect to in the new “Wireless Config” control panel and configure the new “Ethernet Interface” that will appear in the network control panel.

We finally have ADSL at our new place. The world has resumed revolving at normal speed.

When did this happen? Google doing image ads? This doesn’t bode well for the future of man kind. Fortunately: We currently have no plans to show image ads on Google.com. But that “currently” still concerns me.

I try not to blog about stuff that comes through the Reuters Oddly Enough RSS feed because it’s easier to just get it straight from them but the last couple of days have seen some pretty odd stories about Germans come through. Today’s was a german man who was refused a passport because he was dead. Apparently his blind ex-wife had reported him as having died in an explosion but had to get her mother to identify the body due to her lack of sight.

Well I figure if you’re going to do something you may as well do it properly and I’ve been getting into the whole PGP thing lately. The trouble is noone has signed my key making it pretty much worthless. I’m also a long way away from everyone I know who uses PGP and fate seems to work against me when I’m closer to them. Bertrand was in Australia recently and even in Brisbane, unfortunately I was over in San Francisco (btw Bertrand if you manage to read this, my old email is offline at the moment so I can’t find your contact details to let you know that I’m back in the country but I figure you’ve moved on from Brisbane anyway).

Technology is wonderful sometimes but it can have serious drawbacks. Having recently moved house and finally managed to remember my new address and find out what my new phone number is I set out to send my new contact details around to friends and family. It occurred to me that attaching a vcard with all my details might make life easier for some people to get in sync with my new details.

Via Reuters: A German man reported a female chat-line worker to police after facing a phone bill for $7,244 following an all-night flirt session with her She called him unsolicited and told him to call her back saying it would be “a cheap rate”. My favorite quote: The man said they talked about far more than just sex Suuuure.

This is pretty scary. Read it, contemplate it and remember it when you next come to vote. UPDATE: It would help to format the HTML correctly on the link so that browsers actually pay attention to it…. Sorry about that and that’s to the anonymous commenter that pointed out the problem.

John O’Conner raises a good point – Opensource projects tend to have poor documentation. Java tends to have good documentation (IMO, the best documentation I’ve seen for a programming library). Will Opensourcing Java reduce the quality of it’s documentation? The obvious response is that Sun and IBM etc will still be investing so their doc writers can continue writing the documentation just like now. Except that most of the documentation for Java is written by the same people who write the actual code within Sun – at least that’s the impression I get.